From the May 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Another thing that is controversial in the field is standardization of the profession. The HTM field doesn’t have any practice standards. One of the hallmarks of a real profession is having practice standards. Inside of health care, all the professionals have practice standards. Yet even those that are now well-established were very controversial when they were first introduced. AAMI has some in the pipeline and it will be a long term effort. Not everyone in the field understands why standards are needed, but they’re important because if they don’t exist, regulators will develop their own set of standards. We’ve already seen that with CMS coming up with standards for preventive maintenance. If we had standards strongly in place, I don’t think we would have seen that problem come up.

HCBN: What do you anticipate will be the biggest challenge or challenges facing the association in the coming year?
ML: What keeps me up at night now is how industry consolidation will impact AAMI as a professional association. In terms of the profession, what worries me the most from an AAMI perspective is trying to figure out what effect the convergence of medical devices with IT will have on the HTM profession. In 10 years I think the important part of the medical device will be the data inside and not the mechanical thing itself. So in light of that, what will be the role of the HTM professional?
I think the future has to be a willingness to learn the IT functions and be willing to serve in a role where one foot is in IT and the other in HTM. What I’m also concerned about is that the pressure to reduce the cost of health care will push more health care out of hospitals and into homes. I don’t believe that state or federal regulators understand or have figured out that landscape.

HCBN: What do you believe will be AAMI’s most crucial role in helping health care in the future?
ML: I think it’s the same critical role that we’ve always had with a slightly different emphasis. That is, to help with patient safety and risk management issues related to the full life cycle of technology. That takes on a completely different meaning when we’re talking about home health and health IT, where you don’t have the same historical or current level of understanding about the level of risk that standalone medical device management has had.

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